Friday, March 13, 2015

CORNED BEEF & SPAGHETTI

This week’s
openings suggest that it’s Bloody Revenge Weekend:

Run All Night—One of the few pretty funny lines that Neil Patrick Harris
had in this year’s Oscar show was his introduction of Liam Neeson, to the
effect of: “Here’s a man with a particular set of skills—he will find you, and
he will kill you.”

This new melodrama is the latest of Liam Neeson’s murmuring
threat movies, the ones where he earnestly warns some gangster or kidnapper,
usually over the phone, that they’re in big trouble if they don’t lay off some
innocent victim. The bad guys never listen, and buckets of blood pour out of
people’s heads.

Here Neeson plays Jimmy, a conscience-haunted former hitman
in service of Queens crime boss Shawn. Jimmy’s now a pathetic broke drunk, but
when his estranged son Michael (Joel Kinnaman) witnesses Shawn’s cokehead son
Danny (Boyd Holbrook) kill some Albanian gangsters, Jimmy kills Danny in
Michael’s defense. Though he loves Jimmy, Shawn feels he has no choice but to
have Michael killed in recompense, and Jimmy of course is determined to defend
his son.

So bullets fly, and innumerable henchman fall. There are
some rather gothic twists, including one of those unstoppable juggernaut hitmen
that turn up in movies like this, creepily played by rapper Lonnie “Common”
Lynn, called in by Shawn to wipe out father and son (not in that order).

This has the makings of a terrific melodrama, in that it
has two great actors in an unresolvable conflict. Neeson and Harris are both as
commanding as ever, and when they’re onscreen together they’re better yet—two
aging slabs of Irish corned beef who’ve learned first-hand what a vile business
murder is, and gaze at each other tenderly, in genuine sorrow over the horror
they’re unleashing in each other’s lives.

But the movie, directed by frequent Neeson collaborator
Jaume Collet-Serra (he also directed the notorious Orphan) from a script by
Brad Ingelsby, ultimately wastes this great advantage. The action is too
contrived and overscaled, the escapes too improbably hairbreadth, the music by
Junkie XL too blaring. Eventually it gets funny, and then it gets tiresome.

There’s a moment toward the end, when Shawn knows—after one
of those murmuring Neeson phone calls—that Jimmy is about to attack his
stronghold. He looks at a henchman and tells him to tell everyone to get ready:
“Jimmy’s comin’” This could have been a spinetingling melodramatic flourish,
but we’ve seen so much ridiculously cartoonish carnage already that it barely
registers.

Meanwhile, at the Valley Art:

The Salvation—For sheer ugly brutality, this Western revenge
yarn makes Run All Night look like My Little Pony. The hero is Jon (Mads
Mikkelsen) a Danish immigrant in the American West whose family is murdered. He
quickly kills the men responsible, but in so doing gains the enmity of the
twisted gang boss (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who has the craven town under his
thumb. Jon and his brother Peter (Mikael Persbrandt) are former soldiers,
veterans of Denmark’s 1864 Schleswig War, and when they take up arms against
the gang, blood spills copiously.

This Danish/British/South African co-production (it was
shot in the deserts of the latter country) offers shootings and stabbings, rape
and torture, scurvy henchmen and mealy-mouthed officials, most notably Jonathan
Pryce as the corrupt mayor/undertaker. It’s like Titus Andronicus on the range,
right down to a baleful woman (Eva Green) who’s had her tongue cut out.

This description should be enough to determine whether The
Salvation is to your taste—or, indeed, whether you even approve of it—but in
any case it’s executed with precision and confidence in a taut hour and a half.
Director Kristian Levring works, from a script he co-wrote with Anders Thomas
Jensen, more or less in the “Spaghetti western” style, with faux-Morricone
strumming away on the soundtrack, and there wasn’t a minute that I was bored,
or that I didn’t want to see Jon have his revenge. The comeuppance the bad guys
ultimately receive was not painful, humiliating or protracted enough to satisfy
my nasty heart, but in movies like this it almost never is.

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My work has appeared in publications ranging from the New Times weeklies (where I was a staff writer for several years) to USA Today, from Phoenix Magazine and Wrangler News and the East Valley Tribune to the Erie Times-News, Seattle Times and Detroit Metro Times to Rewind Magazine.

I'm that rare example of a living poet who has had a sonnet published in Weird Tales, and my poems have also appeared in Elysian Fields Quarterly.

I've acted in theatre productions in six states and the District of Columbia, and appear for about six seconds as an extra (a prison guard) in the John Waters film Cry-Baby.

I directed Shakespeare's Measure for Measure at Southwest Shakespeare Festival, and a short film called Holding Back the Dawn, based on a short story by my friend Barry Graham.

I was host of Another Saturday Night, a pop culture and film review show on KTAR radio.

I have produced, directed and acted in radio plays for NPR, KTAR and the Sun Sounds Radio service.